BUT IF there were an automatic translation 'machine' what good would it do one to study Latin?Would one not tend to become reliant upon it and thereby not exercising their mind?Again, man would become dependant upon another machine instead of thinking for himself. Excuse me while I get off of my tread mill!

The last Latin auto-translator I used I literally laughed myself silly reading through the results. Of course, it didn't help that I was running through a text that had clearly gone through one of those scanner text-reader programs so there were some instances where "u" became "ii" and vice versa and similar transcription problems that just compounded the errors. But still.

On the other hand, I've used some Spanish to English autotranslators that came up with comprehensible results--but even those you have to take with a grain of salt and keep your wits about you! While I agree it's no substitute for actually learning a language, they can be handy when you're hunting a piece of information and the only place you can find it happens to be in Spanish or French or Norwegian or whatever and you need the gist of a text to see if you're looking in the right place.